Some Linguistic Features of Negro Dialect

How to do things with slurs: Studies in the way of derogatory words

“…Some of these features that have been suggested by linguistic studies include (5) higher rates of non-rhoticity, or r-less-ness, among African Americans than European American cohorts (Labov et al, 1968;Williamson, 1968;Wolfram, 1969;Foley, 1972;Baugh, 1983;Pederson et al, 1986Pederson et al, -1992Myhill, 1988;Edwards, 1997;Wolfram and Thomas, 2002); (6) substitution of /skr/ for /str/ (Fasold and Wolfram, 1970;Labov, 1972a;Wolfram and Fasold, 1974;Bailey and Thomas, 1998;Bailey, 2001;Wolfram and Thomas, 2002); (7) higher rates of ''broad a'' (e.g., as in aunt with the vowel of LOT instead of with the vowel of TRAP); (8) monophthongization, or weakening of glides of the mouth vowel (Wolfram and Thomas, 2002;Thomas, 2007); (9) a shift of word stress to the first syllable in words that are stressed on other syllables in other vernacular forms (e.g., as in December, July, police, hotel) (Fasold and Wolfram, 1970;Baugh, 1983); (10) the use of a wide pitch range, realized as expansions into higher pitches, especially in competitive style speech events (Tarone, 1973;Loman, 1975;Holbrook, 1981, 1982;Jun and Foreman, 1996); (11) a greater likelihood of displaying a high tone at the beginning of a sentence, either as a boundary tone or as a high initial pitch accent, i.e., pitch prominence; (12) a greater likelihood of displaying a variety of final contours in yes/no questions, such as falling or level final contours (Green, 2002), whereas European Americans consistently show a rising final contour (Jun and Foreman, 1996); (13) a statistically significant tendency to raise fundamental frequency (F0) from one stressed syllable to the next more often than European Americans (Wolfram and Thomas, 2002); (14) the deletion of final /n/, with only nasality on the preceding vowel remaining (Bailey, 2001); (15) the deletion of morpheme final voiced stops …”

“…Further, although speakers of many dialects will tend to simplify consonant clusters and delete a stop when the following word begins with a consonant (e.g., as in pas' the house), (22) deletion of a stop when the following word begins with a vowel (e.g., as in pas' a house) occurs more frequently in AAVE than any other European American dialect at any social level (Labov et al, 1968;Wolfram, 1969;Fasold and Wolfram, 1970;Labov, 1972a;Baugh, 1983;Miller, 1986;Butters and Nix, 1986;Pederson et al, 1986Pederson et al, -1992Gordon, 2000;Wolfram and Thomas, 2002).…”

Globalization of African American Vernacular English in popular culture

“…Fasold 1972;Labov 1972;Baugh 1983;Mufwene et al 1998;Rickford 1998;Rickford and Rickford 2000). The literature has argued that AAVE, contrary to what the name suggests, is not exclusively associated with a particular ethnic group, namely, African Americans.…”

Operationalizing Style: Quantifying the Use of Style Shift in the Speech of African American Adolescents

“…Early descriptive work by Labov et al (1968) and Fasold and Wolfram (1970) noted that despite regional differences these patterns tend to share enough of a resemblance in terms of both linguistic structure and social use to be included under the rubric of African American English in the sociolinguistic literature. 1 More recent work by Rickford (1999) provides a list of phonological, morphological, and syntactic features that are common to AAVE, and an even more detailed account of the attributes typical of AAVE speakers is provided by Green (2002).…”